Jacob thought he'd reached his FTP ceiling... we got him another 90watts! [CASE STUDY]

Welcome back to another case study episode where we break down a specific athlete and what we change to help them improve. Now, today's case study focuses on something that we don't talk about very often and that is critical power numbers. And when we say critical power numbers here, for simplification, we're just referring to what are your best power numbers for certain times, Meaning what's your best one minute power, what's your best five minute power, what's your best ten minute power, et cetera. And today's athlete is Jake, the cyclist who came to us as a very strong rider who really loved focusing on these numbers and wanted our help improving them. And the reason we don't focus on them is because for a lot of athletes, you know, their critical power numbers don't necessarily correlate to racing or race times or time trialing etc. But he specifically came to us with a few of these key goals. The first being there's a local climb in our area that he wanted to break 10 minutes on. And the second was he wanted to break 400 watts for 10 minutes as well as improve numbers. In all these efforts he had a few extra goals, but those were two of the key ones. And now because Jake is a data guy, I'm just going to lay out the numbers right now from the start and then we can talk about what happened to change these numbers. So he came to us in November 2021, now October 2023. So almost a two year journey. And on that local climb he was about a 12 minute rider and he wanted to get that down under 10 minutes and just recently he broke it and he rode 9:53. So he took a minute off per year. And he's, yeah, he wrote, he wrote 953, which is achieved that goal. And the second key goal was his 10 minute power was about 370. His goal was to break 400. And yeah, he hit 429 actually on that climb. So that is about a, almost a 60 watt, 59 watt increase over two years. And it's interesting when someone comes with us with a specific power goal again because we don't always look at these numbers. And I'll go through the 1 minute and 5 minutes and 20 minutes power numbers and how they improved throughout the case study. But we want to start with kind of those two key goals and talk about them. But dad, take us through this case study. It's pretty, pretty interesting. Where was he when he, when he kind of came to us describe where he was at?

Yeah, I've Loved working with Jake. He's been a fantastic athlete. I. He's just so motivated and wants to improve and is like a sponge for information. And he loves data and lives and dies by the data. And so, yeah, all of the training he was doing was really all the time trying to do PBS on Strava segments and ride Zwift races where he could race his mates. And highly motivated athlete who just wanted to improve, just wanted to have specific targets that he was improving on. And that's quite a different, as you said in your introduction, quite a different perspective from the people who normally join. And I'm trying to convince him that, yes, that's really, that's really good goals. They're, they're fantastic goals. But you want to be a more all rounded, well measured athlete that's capable of riding for 60 minutes or 20 minutes at really good power, rather than just being a guy who can ride great 10 seconds, 30 seconds or a minute power, you know, you've got quite good at, you've still got more room to improve. And, you know, the goals he set were quite lofty. When you, when you think about maybe 370 or 375 and you're aiming for 400 over 10 minutes, that's quite a significant improvement. 25 watts. And you know, to try and improve two minutes on a climb that only goes for 12 minutes is a huge percentage improvement. And, but you know, these are the things that people come to us with and I never say never and I always say there's no ceiling to anybody's goals. And funnily enough, now he's achieved those goals. We were actually talking the other day about what's next and I was sort of throwing things out to him that he could do that would help him in his journey to be a better bike rider rather than just a Strava segment kind of bike rider. But yeah, look, the things that he started with us was very basic bike riding ability in bunches. Hadn't really done a lot of that. Was mainly riding with his mates. And when you're getting into a big bunch of 20 or 30 people, you can't ride like that. You've got to actually understand the nuances of bunch riding and how to roll turns and how to sit on your bike even, and how to, how to get in the roll and ride not too hard over the front wheel and not hard enough so you're sitting in the wind for too long, getting on the right wheel, it's not surging. And all these things that he had to learn right from the get go. And you know, for such a really good high powered athlete, he still was quite strong when he first joined us.

370 watts for 10 minutes is nothing to shirk at.

That's right. And he was getting, you know, struggling with all of our bunch rights, just hanging on and dropped. And if I take it from that day back in November when he, you know, in 2021 when he first started to today, he's gone from the back of 20, 30 top riders in a bunch and now he's in the top three, four. And that's, that's something, it shows measurement of improvement to me. And he dishes out the pain that he was getting dished out to when he first started to ride with us. And I love that. That's, it's just reward for, for great effort and, you know, consistency. And then he's had lots of ups and downs. I think we mentioned him on a podcast earlier on the year when he went to Scotland for the World Road Championships and got really sick three or four days out before and actually couldn't compete. So, you know, that's a massive disappointment when you travel the whole way across the other side of the world and you don't actually get to do the race that you were preparing for. So along that journey there's been lots of good and lots of low times with sickness and injury. And illness. Yeah.

And so like he said, he was a competitive athlete and he loved racing his mates on Zwift. He loved racing his mates out on the road and they were always trying to, you know, hit Strava segment goals together. So what does that mean he actually needed to work on. You mentioned kind of the bunch writing skills, but you know, from a training perspective, what does, what does that mean as a coach that you look and go, okay, what do we actually do with you?

Yeah, and, and look, when I looked at some of the history and I always ask athletes to load their previous history before they start so I can actually go and have a look at what sort of riding they're doing so that I get a good idea of what, what their body's used to. And it was quite a shock to me that almost every ride he did was between 0.9 and 1.1.01% intensity. Almost every single ride was just hard.

Aka high, super high intensity.

Super high intensity. And, and he was having a ball with his mates. That's what I could, that's what I could glean from the data. And some of the rides were, you know, on Zwift's races and some of the rides were out on the road for two hours, three hours and he was just riding hard the whole time and, and he, he'd reached a pretty good level of fitness but that was going to be unsustainable and there were lot periods where he had two, three, four days off in between because probably maybe he was too busy with work, I don't know the reasons, or maybe he was exhausted from training at that level. But I've got an inkling that it's a combination of all of those things and, and he didn't have any structure and it was always, you know, if all the mates were ready for a ride, then we'd go riding and let's just smash each other and see who can have the bragging rights today. And that's okay as well. And that's, there's nothing wrong with that. You will actually become fitter and get good value, get good health and fitness values from those, from those sessions. And we're not criticizing that. But what we're trying to do, athletes come to us to improve and so you can't sustain that forever. You're going to come to a point where you're just going to level off and if you don't actually put some structure with some other sessions that are going to build that aerobic base and build that adaptiveness that you can carry load in your training so that when you want to ride fast and hard, you have got the fitness that you can actually push out the power that you want to for a sustained period and that short 32nd, 22nd, 1 minute, 5 minute, you know, if you do, if you do that sort of training, that's going to be fantastic for those efforts. But when you come to some of the Gran Fondo races that might have, for example, the Amy's Gran Fondo here in Victoria in Australia, it has, it starts off with a brutal 20 to 30 minute climb in the first kilometer. It goes straight uphill and if you don't have good threshold for 20 or 30 minutes, you're not going to be able to keep up with the main bunch. And that's exactly what's happened to him. He's, he's quite a really good fit, physically strong, high powered rider for five and 10 minutes. But this climb goes for 22 or 23 and he gets separated from the main bunch and therefore the race becomes a different race. He's not with the front group anymore and he's, you know, battling to, to stay close to the front group. But he's never going to bridge across. So I'm trying to get him to change his way of thinking to be a better, all rounded athlete cyclist that can actually go in any race that you want, whether it's a short criterium, whether it's a road race that's got no hills whatsoever and you can roll turns well, or a handicap race where you know how to roll the proper handicap turns, or a race like that, a gran fondo that's got some climbs where you need to have threshold capacity to be able to stay up with the. So these are the areas that, that I identified that he was needing work on. And, and you know, to his credit he, he, he wants to do that and he's really tried to do that, but he's still focused on those goals that he had early on, which is actually okay. But at the end of the day the next step for him is to actually do this next level, which is threshold writing.

It's a classic coach's perspective where he hits all his goals and you know, you go, okay, well no, he's, here's where I can still see more potential from you and where you can improve. But I want to break down what you just said a bit further in terms of that Amy's gran fond where you say he's really good for these short power numbers. So when he came to us, yeah, we want to reiterate that point, he had really good numbers. As we said, 370 for 10 minutes. 370 watts for 10 minutes is really strong. That's really good writing. So for someone that's already really good at 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, how do you actually how he made this jump? And if I look at through his numbers, let's look through the critical power numbers specifically. So his one minute power, best power when he started was 514. That's gone up to 739. So that's over 200 watts. His one minute's gone up by. That's monstrous. Holding 739 watts per minute. Five minutes has gone from four hundred and eighteen to four hundred and fifty six. I think we said his goal was to break four hundred and fifty for that, which he did. So four hundred and eighteen to four hundred fifty six again, almost forty watts increase over five minutes. Like he's ten minutes. We've spoken about 370 to 429, but even his twenty minutes has gone up. You know, he did the same climb in the hills and again in the local area in the Danny Nongs and he was 336 watts when he joined us and that's gone up to 3,70 ish, 375 on the same climb. So again I'm, I'm explaining these numbers and 1 minute, 5 minute, 10 minute, 20 minute, they've all had jumps and again that 1 minute, 5 minute, 10minute, quite significant jumps. How does an athlete like him, who was already really strong find these improvements when he, when that was all he was practicing? Technically, he should just be really good at that and he should be maxing out of that.

Yeah. And for most people that they would be happy with those numbers for the next five, 10 years, but he just felt that there was more improvement in him and, and he wanted to extract the most he could out of his, out of himself and he wanted to see where he could go. And so he embraced the program and really one of those athletes that love coaching because he's listening to the advice and at the same time he's still got that boyish attitude of I still want to have a crack with my mates here and there, but he's actually understanding that with, you know, being a bit more patient on some rides and just staying in zone two on. And he really did that well. He, he, you know, I remember a couple of training camps that he went up to Port Douglas, it was a family holiday, but we called it a training camp. And he, he was, he was really having a really good time having two weeks of, you know, uninterrupted training with, with family, obviously most days as a priority. But he was able to go and do zone two rides where he was strictly not allowed to ride hard. He found that very fatiguing and tiring when you're having to back up day after day for, you know, for over two weeks. And they were good examples to him that you can't just go hard when you've got a good two week block of training where you've got more time than you normally would have as a working normal person, you know, nine to five, you know, during the year. So, so, you know, they were hard lessons he learned where he was just riding, you know, even the zone two easy rides, he was still riding them too hard. So when it came to the next day, he was carrying too much fatigue. And then four days later he was, you know, paying the price for the, what he did three days earlier. And so, so they're the things that we really changed so that when he wanted to ride hard, he could actually ride harder than he was before because he had a great fitness Base that we were building. Whereas before he didn't have that, he would just ride till he dropped and he was not really riding past two or three hours. And you know, regularly now he can ride four and a half to six hours and, and you know, still have a tough day out there. But it's almost double the time that he can spend on the bike because he's got that fitness base and he's done all his groundwork in zone two and not just going out day after day doing the same high intensity stuff. So pulling him back, doing longer endurance, pulling his high hard days back to only two a week with the endurance ride with some intensity of 30 minutes or so in that long endurance ride and making sure those two hard days he rides harder than he's ever ridden before so that he has to actually recover on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday so that he can actually implement those two hard days instead of the three, four, five hard days he was doing before. That was actually just really physically fatiguing him so that he couldn't actually push any higher numbers. So that seems really obvious to everybody who's listening. But to implement that into something you've been doing over and over again, people don't like change and they don't trust it. How am I going to ride better if I ride slower? That doesn't even. That sentence doesn't even make logic, does it? So if you ride slower in zone two, you will actually be able to ride faster in zone 5 and 6 when it counts because you're not as exhausted as you were the other day. So you've got more fresh legs to ride properly. But that doesn't happen straight away. That takes months of getting your body to adapt to that aerobic fitness and absorbing the load that we're giving you. So initially he sort of went backwards a bit with his power peak power numbers because he was carrying a lot more fatigue from the load that we were giving him. And then it starts to turn around when he freshens up because we don't do that every week for six months. We do that as a period of hard riding, then recovery and testing. And once his body adapted to that style of training, they started to see, oh geez, this does work. I am now actually doing better. 1 minute, 5 minute, 10 minute, and even the 20 minute numbers were going up and up. And once the person's on board and seeing improvement, then they start to trust the process a whole lot more. You can't convince them of that at the start because they're doubting. But they're reaching out to you because they want to improve in some way. They can't get it themselves.

Yeah, it's just this fascinating sense of if you just do 11 or 12 minute efforts like that climb was that he was really attacking, uh, you'd think you'd get really good at that, and he did. But if you just keep doing VO2 sessions over and over and hot, really high intensity sessions over and over, you will get good at that. But you hit a ceiling so much quicker. And when you add in that what you just said before, it's, you know, that consistency with that base, you're giving yourself this other element, that, that strong aerobic base. And that is the thing that helps him break through to suddenly now ride down and break 10 minutes for that climb. And that's the important thing to understand, I think, is, you know, if you, yeah, you can do high intensity, that's great for you, but without the aerobic base work and that consistency that you're talking about, you'll hit a ceiling. So I guess to finish with, I mean, what, what do you, what does he actually say now? I mean, how happy is he? What's, what's he thinking say about this?

Yeah, look, it's great that I had a phone call from him saying, this is the best phone call to make to you, coach. I've achieved all my goals. I could not be happier. I've exceeded my expectations quicker than I ever thought I could. I'm just in awe of what I'm doing. I've never been so happy on the bike. And these are, these are a great conversation to have. And he's now saying, well, I actually don't know what to do next. Where do I go from here? What goals can I set? And I'm throwing it straight back at him. I can see huge areas where we can still improve you and threshold riding at threshold or just below it, or just above it and not at VO2, where you're really good at. Let's just hone in on the area that you need to develop and that's that threshold riding where it's 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes, holding that, that high right on your threshold number, that will make you an all round better bike rider. Because you've already got high, short power efforts in you. Now we need to develop your ability to sustain an effort. So if you get in a bike race and you, you know, you're breaking away on the punchy short climbs and you get out there for all of a sudden you're solo if you don't have that ability to ride the threshold to the finish, you're going to get caught and end up coming nowhere. So that's the next thing that we need to work on. And he's already selected some, some 20 minute power goals that he wants to achieve. And ironically it's 400 watts, which is what he could do for 10 minutes with his first goal. So I'm saying, well, that's a pretty big goal, 20 minutes at 400, when, you know, 10 minutes two years ago. So, yeah, so, you know, we've, we've certainly had a good chat about that and, and yeah, you know, there's lots of things he can learn to develop better. His bike handling skills in a bunch and the way he sits on a bike and the way he rolls, turns. So it's, it's a, it's an athlete that I love helping because he's highly motivated and he wants to learn and he wants to listen and, and they're the sort of people who will get their goals achieved. And you know, it does, it does take some ups and downs, but eventually, if you stay consistent, you will actually arrive at, at your destination and then it's time to select another one.

That's a great way to finish. Another great case study example. And we've had some great feedback on these case studies and we'll keep doing them. We've got our normal podcast each week and we've got our case study each week. And because we've heard that athletes love hearing, obviously the training advice and the racing advice, but also a specific athlete example of where it's applied and then how the application actually works for a range of different athletes. And that's our goal with these case studies. So we hope you've enjoyed it and we'll see you next week on both episodes. You.